oriented, he rose from his seat and walked carefully past groups of men and to the side of the bar on the left where there were tables. He stood and listened to two or three conversations at different tables and then went to the middle one. He stood over it, felt the eyes and attention of its occupants slowly turn towards him, and took out his KGB identity card. They saw the special clearance and the note at the foot of the card that all knew—though it didn’t state so—as the imprimatur of Department S.
Balthasar felt an intake of breath from the four men at the table and then felt their attention completely caught by his presence.
“Which of you is with the PDSS?” he asked.
There was a slight pause. Finally one of the men spoke. “The two of us here,” he said, and pointed to the man sitting next to him on the bench. In his mind’s eye Balthasar formed the picture of the two of them.
“I’d like to talk to the two of you alone,” he said. Then turning to the other two men on his side of the table, he said, “Excuse me. I’ll just be a few minutes.”
He felt them drag themselves to their feet. A thumping Russian dance track reverberated across the bar as Balthasar took a seat at the table. He sipped his beer again and relaxed back into the seat. The PDSS were the special
“I’m here for the first of May,” Balthasar said. “Will you all be on duty?”
There was a pause. The men were reluctant to divulge their orders to someone they didn’t know, even someone as important as a colonel from Department S.
“No,” one of the men grudgingly replied at last.
“No sonars and no frogmen,” Balthasar said. “My department thinks that’s rash.”
“You’re from the SVR,” the second man said. “That’s your view, maybe. But we’re with the GRU. Nothing’s going to happen in an hour with them switched off.”
“All the sonars—passive and active—all the way down the coast?” Balthasar said. “It’s very unusual.”
“Unprecedented. But those are our orders and you have no jurisdiction with the GRU.”
“General Antonov should know,” Balthasar said, and felt the men stiffen at the mention of the GRU boss. “It’s irregular.”
“I imagine he already knows,” the first man said.
“What will you be doing on the first of May?” Balthasar said.
“Screwing and drinking, most likely.” The second man laughed. “What’s your business here, anyway? Why don’t you get lost?”
But Balthasar had gotten to his feet. “You may find your orders will change,” he said.
“Not by you, they won’t,” the first man replied.
Balthasar walked away to the bar and finished his drink as his mind turned over the possibilities. He felt one of the PDSS men brush past quite close to him and take the attention of another man at the far end of the bar. He felt the eyes of both these men fix on him. Then he put down the glass, empty now, and walked out of the bar and into the street.
After walking for thirty yards or so, he felt three men following behind him.
31
NOW LISTEN CAREFULLY, LOGAN. Eric is a veteran of the war in Algeria. He pulled out countless fingernails there, didn’t you, Eric?” Laszlo paused and surveyed the bound, gagged, and terrified Logan who sat upright in a wooden chair, his eyes wild and his head raging with whisky and fear. “It may be forty years ago,” Laszlo continued, “but he’s lost none of his old skills. And believe me, the fingernails were the soft end of his talents.” Logan’s eyes rolled sideways at the hulking figure of Eric who stood over him like an attack dog, the sleeves of his T-shirt rolled up over his shoulders and his big fists clamped together so that the knuckles were white. “Claude is much younger, maybe even stronger, and has more”—Laszlo paused—“more modern techniques, shall we say. And he’s even more effective. Claude has spent a great deal of his life being punished and now—once we found him and took him under the wing of the DGSE—now he likes to deal it out. Get his own back.” Laszlo stood up and walked over to a window. The curtain was drawn but he stood as if he was gazing out at something. He’d changed his suit since the three of them had gotten Logan out of the hotel three hours before, hanging half drunk between Claude and Eric and fully stunned. Now Laszlo was wearing a crisp, dark blue, fitted designer suit of the kind worn by multimillionaire footballers. “Okay, do it,” he said.
He heard the blows raining in on Logan and stayed turned to the curtain. No sound came from the gagged figure of Logan but the snap and thud of knuckles on flesh and bone.
“That’s enough,” Laszlo said, and turned when the beating had stopped.
He saw agony in Logan’s eyes. “Untie the gag,” he said.
The two embassy security men carefully undid the knot, one handling the gag, the other ready to clamp his hand over Logan’s mouth. But Logan hung in the chair as if suspended from the ceiling and his breath came in agonised rasping pants followed by a death rattle noise from the bottom of his throat.
“That’s what happens if you do nothing,” Laszlo said. “If you fail to give me what I’m asking for, however, it will be a lot worse. Got it?”
Logan couldn’t speak. A long, low moan escaped from his lips, but the job Eric and Claude had done on him was expert and there were no marks on his face. Sweat poured down him and he’d urinated in his trousers.
“Give him some water,” Laszlo ordered.
Claude held a bottle to Logan’s lips and poured it as if he were filling a bucket until Logan choked and screamed, but the sound was simply the noise of vomit and water and whisky spilling down his chin.
“So,” Laszlo said. “Why did you give me a false address? Where’s the right one?”
Logan groaned.
“We haven’t got time to stroke the information from you,” Laszlo warned. “Where’s the house? Where’s Resnikov?”
“That was the house,” Logan rasped falteringly. “I swear. That’s where they were.”
“But they aren’t there, are they?” Laszlo snarled now.
“Then they must have left. What was there?” he said, looking at Eric with terrified eyes. “You must have seen something. Were there signs of anything burned? Did you check the rental agency? You’ll find it was rented, but I don’t know under what name.” Logan talked in staccato sentences, and then repeated himself, anything to keep in the game, to keep them from hitting him again.
“Well?” Laszlo said to Eric.
“There was a metal barrel outside at the back,” Eric said reluctantly. “Signs of stuff being torched, I’d say.”
“And the rental company?”
“It was too late by the time we got there. We’ll have to find out in the morning.”
It was eleven o’clock in the evening, according to Laszlo’s watch, which he looked at now. The watch was a Piaget, Logan noted blearily, the same type that Putin wore.
“You have a few more hours of comfort in that chair, then,” Laszlo said to him. “But then the hammer really drops if I find you’ve been lying.” He looked at Eric and Claude. “Don’t hurt him too much,” he said, and left the room.
32
